Four minute k - Part 1

Saturday, 6 December 2025

Almost exactly a year ago Jett, Jon, Zali and I were sitting in a hire car on the entrance ramp to the Essendon DFO shopping centre.  It was close to Black Friday so the queues to get into the car park were hefty. So hefty in fact, that google maps reported that it would take us 4 minutes to cover the remaining 1km.  Uff, I sighed, I could run that faster.  " You sure about that mum?" asked Jett.  Of course I could! I responded.  One thing led to another and Jett, so confident in his assessment of my current and future athletic potential, bet 20% of all his future income that I would never run a sub 4 minute kilometre again.  I should also say that Jett was not alone in this - Jon also expressed extreme dubiousness while Zali appeared to be a bit more split between both opinions.  

Fired up by this exchange I got stuck into doing exactly nothing about it for the next 10 months. Part of this very one sided bet (I had no stakes except my honour and reputation) was that there was no time limit for me to acheive this - but obviously it wasn't going to get any easier.

The issue was that I really dislike doing interval training which was undoubtably what this challenge was going to demand. I should say that I had no real evidence that I could do this - it's been a long time since I would've been close to that sort of pace - but of course back in the day this would've been easy - in fact for a few years I was aiming for a 40 minute 10k, which would have involved 10 of these 4 minute kilometres in a row - I didn't actually manage it but I came close enough to suggest I wouldn't done a fair few 4 minute k's in my attempts.   

 Once the Australian Orienteering Championships were out of the way in early October,  I decided it was time to start the journey to victory.  In fact the journey would perfectly combine with training for the Oceania Sprint Champs happening on the January long weekend next year.  So I set myself a date - 20th of January 2026, on which to attempt the feat or declare Jett to be completely correct his assessment of my feebleness.

With 12 weeks to the date, I asked chatGPT to set me a training program and it was happy to oblige with a16 week program (for the 12 weeks available) including building up my long runs to 20k.  Which was completely stupid but I kept the interval portion of the training program and just added in a few easy runs in between.  

With the program ready it was time to actually DO the training. ..